Far-right indoctrination in Texas schools.

[SlowwHand]

Because it's his alternate desperation subject. Whining about Texas.
It doesn't matter that Texans don't like it. He's going to jump on the chance to whine.

[DaShi]

Everyone! Please stop being mean to Texas. They don't like it.

[SlowwHand]

I don't really care, other than it gets boring. I know a simpleton like you doesn't need much.

[Dinner]

How Texan conservative partisans want to distort history.

Texas Board of Education messes with history
The history of all hitehrto existing society is the history of Ronald Reagan being awesome

Texas chauvinists may think their state, with its past as an independent nation, has the coolest history. But they have a hell of a way of taking it out on the rest of us.

With last Friday's lopsided vote, the Texas State Board of Education has preliminarily imposed new standards for the state’s history textbooks. Because the Texas market is so large, textbook publishers from around the country have to cater to what Texas wants. And what Texas wants is right-wing history.

What the board voted for on Friday is more or less what you’d guess: less Franklin Roosevelt, more Ronald Reagan. The board will require students to learn about the key actors and moments in the rise of the New Right: the Moral Majority, Phyllis Schlafly, the Heritage Foundation and the Contract With America. Even the Tea Parties may make their way in.

The list goes on: religious deviant Thomas Jefferson no longer counts as an influential Enlightenment thinker; John Calvin and Thomas Aquinas are his replacements. In learning about economics, students will have to study the libertarian economist Friedrich von Hayek and analyze the decline of the dollar and the end of the gold standard. The board would like greater play for Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and also lengthier discussion of how the two parties broke down on civil rights in the 1960s. The American economic system will be branded "free enterprise," because calling it "capitalism" sounds scarily like something a real, professional historian might say. (Or, alternately, the Wall Street Journal.) We could keep going like this for a while.

In a certain light, all this stuff can seem nearly reasonable. Why shouldn’t students know how civil rights split the Democrats and Republicans? Ronald Reagan did make American political history. Obviously, Calvin and Aquinas were immensely important figures in the history of theology and philosophy. Students, in theory, should learn about Hayek -- a Nobel laureate and a crucial figure in 20th-century thought -- and how money works. And "free enterprise" is obviously a commonly used term to describe American economic life.

Get a little closer, though, and you realize it's just a heap of bull****. It’s not that any single item is in itself false. Instead, each is profoundly misleading, while still, in some strict sense, meeting the standard of being "true." Let’s do a quick breakdown of some of the points mentioned above.

* History can come down to a question of emphasis. Stressing the Reagan Revolution at the cost of the New Deal is an obvious expression of bias. Simply put, we don’t know yet what the Reagan years meant. By historical standards, it’s very recent. So it’s fairly preposterous to be making claims about how it -- or the Tea Parties -- hasn’t received enough attention in the textbooks. Neither has the Obama healthcare reform initiative, I suppose.
* Calvin and Aquinas were indeed both crucial figures in the development of European thought and modern Christianity. What neither of them was, by even the longest stretch of the imagination, was an Enlightenment thinker. For one thing, Calvin was dead about a century before anyone could reasonably claim as the Enlightenment’s start date. For Aquinas, that figure is more like 400 years. This, by itself, reveals how idiotic lumping them into the Enlightenment is -- we’re expected to believe that it included figures 300 years apart from each other, and as much as 500 years apart from Thomas Jefferson. Nor is there even a tenuous intellectual connection with Enlightenment ideals, spanning across these skipped-over centuries. Aquinas and Calvin were respectively a Catholic priest and a Protestant theocrat. If you had to describe the Enlightenment in a word, it might well be "secularization." That's probably why it's being kept out of the textbooks.
* The partisan breakdown on civil rights is indeed embarrassing for Democrats. Both parties split on the issue, but Republicans were crucial to the passage of the landmark 1960s laws, over the opposition of southern Democrats. Republicans love to cite this point, then ignore the fact that their party then went on to nominate a presidential candidate who had opposed the Civil Rights Act, and welcomed into its fold all those southern Democrats -- Strom Thurmond comes to mind -- who they want to use to tar the modern Democratic Party. The point here is apparently that Thurmond used to call himself a Democrat, and now so does Harry Reid. Perhaps more pertinent is that the Civil Rights Act was passed by the Senate’s left wing, over the objection of its right wing.
* Renaming our economic practices as "free enterprise" and refusing to say "capitalism" is a favorite strategy of conservatives who like to pretend that capitalism is just a natural part of human life. In fact, like everything else, it has a history. It developed slowly in the late Middle Ages, and in various ways enlisted the violent assistance of European (and eventually American) governments to divide up common property, erase old economic traditions and drive peasants off the land and into factories.

The problem with all of this is that it takes the history out of history. The Texas board seems to imagine that all of human existence has been a static conflict between the forces of Almighty God and the Almighty Dollar on the one hand, and the secular humanist socialists on the other. This is not a tenable proposition. You can't proudly claim among your intellectual predecessors both the liberal, pro-civil rights Republicans of 1964 and also Confederate hero Jefferson Davis. You can't be for a small, unobtrusive state and also ignore the fact that "free enterprise" was created by massive government violence. Something has to give. In this case, it's any semblance of honesty in education.

http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/03/14/texas_history/index.html

[MrFun]

Because it's his alternate desperation subject. Whining about Texas.
It doesn't matter that Texans don't like it. He's going to jump on the chance to whine.

Will you stop whining about people who whine?


And let me know when you can back up the accusation you made about me earlier in the thread - dumbass.

[Ecofarm]

I don't see anything outrageous. I'm pretty happy with most all of the changes.

It would be good if they could concentrate some on Jefferson's personal agricultural practices and how that impacted or illustrated his personal philosophy.

One thing I don't like is Aquinas. He was a "the earth is there to be righteously raped" kind of guy; typical for his era but nonetheless disgusting and pathetic.

[SlowwHand]

Will you stop whining about people who whine?


And let me know when you can back up the accusation you made about me earlier in the thread - dumbass.

You back it up all the time, all by yourself, dumbass little punk.
Have you managed to go around town by yourself yet, or do you still tremble in your shoes at the thought? Mouthing off from a PC hundreds of miles away doesn't really gird you for the task. You have to actually go.

[MrFun]

Nope, I don't see where I've said or implied that all Texans are far-right nuts who want to deliberately distort the teaching of history. So I guess you don't know what you're talking about. It definitely would not be the first time.

[DaShi]

Slowwhand is the definition of irony.

[Ben Kenobi]

http://www.salon.com/news/politics/w...ory/index.html

Commies complaining about distorting history?

[Arrian]

I don't particularly care if Texas wants to do wacky **** to its school curriculum.

If it is indeed true, however, that text book publishers just print whatever Texas says to print, then this is concerning. The solution is probably what Dr. Strangelove suggests - get a coalition of New England states together with NY (or some other similar conglomeration) and out-weight Texas.

-Arrian

[MrFun]

I don't particularly care if schools teach children misinformation and falsehoods.

-Arrian

fixed

[Ecofarm]

There's nothing quoted that qualifies as "wacky".

[Boris Godunov]

CE/BCE have been used for centuries (at least since the 1600s), so I don't see the problem with them. It is just as common to see that notation in academic writings nowadays. Anyone who therefore objects because it hurts their religious feelings for academics or Jews or what have you to use them instead of A.D./B.C. can suck my balls.

Besides, the A.D./B.C. nomenclature is, if anything, wrong. Nobody accepts that Jesus, if he existed, was born in the year 1.

[MrFun]

Anyone who therefore objects because it hurts their religious feelings for academics or Jews or what have you to use them instead of A.D./B.C. can suck my balls.

You got another new mattress recently, Boris?